He searched his ex's license plate 56 times. Flock asked why — he clicked "Wanted Person"
A patrolman in Alpharetta, Georgia ran the plates of two fellow officers and one uncle more than 100 times in three months. The system asked him for a reason each time. Filling it in, he said, was "just a quick keystroke."
Cameras on poles read the license plate of every car that passes and store where it was and when. In the United States, thousands of them are run by one company, Flock Safety, and a patrol officer can search them from a laptop. What happens when the officer wants to know where his ex is?
We now have an unusually detailed answer. Dustin Bozzo, who until this month worked as a patrolman in the Atlanta-area suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, allegedly used Flock 56 times between March and May to search for the license plate of a former romantic partner — a fellow member of the Alpharetta Police Department. Then he noticed another officer's car kept turning up near hers, and ran that plate 29 times. When she borrowed her uncle's car after a crash, he ran the uncle's plate too: 18 times between April 5 and April 14. That is 103 searches on three people, none of whom knew. WIRED got the internal file — written by Alpharetta police Sergeant Jabbar Braithwaite — through a public records request.
Here is the mechanism, and it's smaller than you'd hope. Flock's system prompts the officer to say why he is searching. Bozzo almost always selected either "Wanted Person" or "Traffic Infraction." Asked why those two, he explained that doing so was "just a quick keystroke." The audit log recorded all 103 searches faithfully. It just recorded them as police work.
The system asked for a reason. Nobody asked back.
So the control on a nationwide camera network turns out to be a drop-down menu the searcher fills in himself, checked — if at all — only after someone complains. In this case someone did, and the log became evidence. That's the good news and the bad news in one sentence: the trail exists, and it sat there unread for three months.
And this is the gentle version of the story. Bozzo said he was trying to make sure the officer had arrived home safely, and Braithwaite did not find any evidence to undermine his claim that he hadn't acted with "malice or an intent to harm." Even so, Braithwaite told him that "regardless of his stated motivation," the use of Flock was "inconsistent with Department policy and the authorized use of the system." WIRED counts at least 45 documented incidents of police officers misusing Flock to look up current or former romantic partners across the country. Most of them we know almost nothing about.
Anyone who drives past a camera, which in a lot of American towns is everyone. It lands hardest on people whose whereabouts someone wants: a woman who left a relationship and now drives home at 2 am, someone leaving an abusive partner, the friend whose car happens to be parked nearby and gets pulled into it — as the second officer here did, for nothing more than helping her move house. It also lands on the 20-somethings who drive for a living: delivery, rideshare, night shifts. Your plate is your name in this system, and you never see who typed it in. The two officers being tracked were cops themselves, with badges and access to the same tool. It didn't protect them.
Bozzo was placed on paid leave on July 20 and resigned on August 5. Lieutenant Jason Hiott says an "ongoing criminal investigation" is underway in the department's Criminal Investigations Division, and police chief Trent Lindgren says the investigation will likely be finished soon — no date was given. So the checkable thing is whether that criminal investigation ends in a charge or in nothing, and whether it says anything about the drop-down menu that let 103 searches through. Flock did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.
Bozzo didn't hack anything. He clicked a menu item, twice a day, for three months, and the machine believed him. The investigator concluded he probably wasn't out to hurt anyone — and that's the unsettling part, because this is what the harmless version looks like. When WIRED messaged him on Facebook, he changed his profile picture and his name.
Sources: WIRED, "A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend," August 27, 2026, based on public records requests and the internal Alpharetta Police Department report.
Камеры, которые снимают номера машин на улицах, оказались доступны любому патрульному без реального контроля: 85 поисков за три месяца, оправдание в системе выбиралось «в одно нажатие» — и таких случаев по стране уже минимум 45.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections